Re: [Social-discuss] What should GNU social be?

[Toby Inkster]

On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 18:55 -0500, Matt Lee wrote:

> With that in mind, what are your ideas for GNU social? 

I posted my ideas for GNU social a few months ago:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/social-discuss/2009-10/msg00002.html

Executive summary: two functionally independent, but (for the sake of
ease of use) visually integrated components:

1. A publishing tool, allowing me to publish my profile, activities and
other data using RDF. This might be served up as XML files or as RDFa
hanging off human-readable pages - doesn't matter. The tool needs to be
able to set independent access controls on each activity and profile
datum.

2. A consuming tool. You give it a link to your friend, it perhaps
performs a handshake with their publishing tool to get access to some of
your friend's less-public data, and it then allows you to read their
data in a friendly interface. 

The great thing about this architecture is that it's pretty much
zero-invention. No need to create new protocols and formats which nobody
else speaks - the protocol is HTTP; the data model is RDF; the format is
RDF/XML, XHTML+RDFa, Atom+RDFa or whatever other formats can be used to
encode RDFa.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:address@hidden>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>